Telepathy and emotions question

'bit' is an understatement. i form whole paragraphs about what i think is going on, at least three paragraphs per word... sometimes it's fun, other times it's hard to cope

hehe :-)

Phased said:

just spotted a typo

You can click on "More" and then "Edit" your own posts when the shame kicks in hard!

just spotted a typo in the last post that is particularly important to correct - emotion physically Affects me too :-)

At last I seem to have an answer to your initial question if I get this!

Yep I also get the physical empathy thing a lot too :-)

For me personally it's a VERY mixed blessing.

On the one hand (sorry about the pun!) it is very useful in some ways to me and others as I use my body as a tool for physical therapy.  On the other it is a right nuisance that really messes with me as I can find emotional contagion from others physically effecting me badly without the thinking skills to deal with it.

I have used work-arounds in the form of physical meditations and emotional training to somewhat insulate me from it - but this is all a bit artificial and ultimately one cannot avoid things getting thro'.  And indeed I don't think that ultimately it is healthy to attempt to do so and can be denying what may be a bit of a gift.

Best wishes -/\- :-)

Sir Simon Baron-Cohen who is a professor at the University of Cambridge and has a very significant role in helping to understand autism explains about empathy at a little after 32:20 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFQVYcclqF0   He explains that empathy may be subdivided into cognitive empathy and affective empathy.

Autistic people according to this struggle with (cognitively) imagining what other people might be thinking or feeling.  Unless they are told what the circumstances when they are very able to do so. 

Affective empathy involves an automatic physiological and emotional response to another's state, leading to a shared emotional experience and this is not generally a problem for autistic people and may indeed be enhanced.  Perhaps this is the hyper empathy you describe?.

To add another type of empathy to the mix there is physical empathy, sometimes called "somatic empathy".  According to a quote from google on the topic:  "While affective empathy is the emotional response to another's feelings, physical affective empathy goes a step further by manifesting as physical symptoms, like a stomach ache when someone is nervous or a blush when they are embarrassed."  

I believe your description at the start of the thread Joanna44 very well describes not knowing in your mind what the person is thinking however you are able to consciously "work around" this by being aware that your body does as it generates physical empathy.   I get what you do about dogs - my understanding and experience is that it goes both ways between the species. :-)

Physically empathy at long distance which you also describe gets us into a whole other explanation to which I suggest 2 broad (possibly pseudo-)scientific possibilities that spring to my mind:

1: would be some form of quantum entanglement as yet not, as far as I am aware, experimentally verified from physical sciences.

2: would be that your (perhaps as an autistic trait exceptional) pattern recognition capability may be subconsciously identifying how the other person is feeling based upon all sorts of complex cues and identifiers historically.  (e.g. maybe what the person is like, how they have reacted in similar circumstances, anniversaries etc.)  In the absence of you being able to consciously be aware of this your body is telling you "in the moment" what the pattern recognition is suggesting the state of the person at long distance to you to be.  It is presenting it to you by physical empathy because it can't get it to you as a directly aware thought .  Again I am not aware of whether this is "formally" experimentally replicated. However the theory, i propose, is at least a feasible one?

Personally I have experiences where I have been moved to contact people close to me after a long time and find there is a reason for it that appears to have pre-empted it.  Or they say "I was just thinking of you...".  This has happened vice versa.  This may be a similar situation of subconscious pattern recognition or maybe even that quantum entanglement?  Or maybe it is co-incidence, just good manners and one's mind tries to make sense of it?

Thanks for leading me into this discussion :-) best wishes

Though it's a fuzzy distinction, for sure! For me it's like 'feeling' them as physical sensations. it is bizarre. Then I found out about how many with Aphantasia can feel e.g. their memories as physical sensations instead of being able to 'see' them in their mind's eye. And many with Alexythemia may still have physical symptoms that denote emotions - except we don't know we're having an emotion, kind of thing.

It's then just one step further to feeling other people's, I suppose (!!)

Hehe no it does kinda make sense, sounds like you 'read the room' (a bit more quickly than they can speak!)

I kinda just know what someone is thinking or about to say before they say it and it makes the rest of their sentence really hard to focus on because I have AuDHD and think at a million miles an hour so I get bored really quickly and start taking more detailed notice of my surroundings and end up getting overwhelmed before they finish the sentence... 

I know that isn't the same as what you're talking about but that's my variation of it...

Perhaps you are right, feeling others emotions is different from sensing them. 

Hm... I meant, literally. Not metaphorically... I *literally* feel others' feelings, especially when they're strong enough & connected with me.

From your reply, I think there was a misunderstanding & you took what I said as metaphorically, perhaps?

As I mentioned, the person doesn't have to be physically with me. They can be even on another continent.

Yes it's so overwhelming! Thanks for confirming my reality  

I can go mostly mute when my own emotions get to me. I often get the hyper-empathy thing, too, and then I go mostly mute when other people's emotions get to me. That makes me pretty rubbish at doing anything about it. I'm stuck there, staring, silent, and not being able to say a word to comfort or support them.

that is wise Autismman perhaps mirror neurons play a role too - as we subconsciously posturally adopt.

Pattern recognition could well be the key to all that we describe as empathy in this context at least. Rapid recovery subconsciously of pre existing experiences and memories (could be someone else from our past made us feel the same or gave off the same impression/aura) creating a profile to try match the current circumstance. The tricky bit is if you are able to pull this information as newly acquired without much life experience of others. However I have people watched a long time, sometimes they don’t need to speak to much for you to judge their being, what people do is always more important than what they say.

Yes, I feel others thought and emotions.  And like on the other thread the word empathy comes to mind.  I wonder if you might be selling short how much subliminal information the mind receives and how much pattern recognition it can make in its' deductions? The bit that confounds me regularly is when the person claims that's not what they are thinking or feeling if one is "rude enough" to point it out...  Either I get it really wrong sometimes or denial isn't just a river in Egypt :-)  Tricky thing is that maybe the neurotypical brain does all sorts of subconscious social analysis and automatically lines up a socially acceptable biased response quicker than my (for one) autistic brain does.  So social collusion in inaccurate representation of the facts sometimes is more likely in neurotypicals than autistic in my experience.  Hehe, I would say that tho' wouldn't I - and maybe you feel you knew i was already likely to say it!  All the best :-)